The Ordeal of Civility

The Matrix of the Method

The method Freud discovered for reaching the unconscious id he called “free association.” While it developed out of the “cathartic method” of his colleague Breuer, Ernest Jones finds its source in an essay of Ludwig Börne entitled “The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days.” Write down for three days in succession, Börne prescribes, everything that comes into your head, “without any falsification or hypocrisy.” This “seed” sprouted twenty years later in the prescription, the “primary rule” of the psychoanalytic situation, in which the patient was to give his thoughts and feelings absolutely free play, verbalizing everything. “Ludwig Börne (1786-1837),” writes Jones, “who had in 1818 adopted this name in place of his own (Baruch Löb), was an idealist, a fighter for freedom, honesty, justice, and sincerity, and always opposed to oppression…. The graves of Börne and Heine were the only two Freud looked for when he visited Pére Lachaise” cemetery in Paris.¹

What Freud does is to create a social situation—the “analytic situation”—which is the inversion of the “civil society” outside the door of his Viennese consulting room. Marx had stood Hegel on his head as a prelude to standing bourgeois society on its head. By the century’s end, revolution had failed. The emancipated Jew had become further embourgeoised; his internalization of the norms of Western culture had proceeded, in Freud’s view, to the point of no return. The censorship that was politeness had, as we have seen, entered his very dreams, disguising the wishes of the uncivilized id.

In an address of capital importance delivered by Freud in 1910 before the Second International Psycho-Analytic Congress at Nuremberg—“The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy’—he betrays the sociocultural”secret" of the origins of psychoanalytic therapy, its free-association method, and the social situation (the dyad of analyst and analysand) congruent with its praxis:

Suppose that a number of ladies and gentlemen in good society had planned a picnic at an inn in the forest one day. The ladies make up their minds that if one of them wants to relieve a natural need she will say aloud that she is going to pick flowers; but a malicious fellow hears of this secret and has printed on the programme which is sent around to the whole party—“If the ladies wish to retire they are requested to say that they are going to pick flowers.” Of course after this no lady will think of availing herself of this flowery pretext, and other freshly devised formulas of the same kind will be seriously compromised by it. What will be the result? The ladies will own up to their natural needs without shame and none of the men will take exception to it.² [My emphasis]

This “just suppose” story of Freud is, as Philip Rieff notes, “a parody of the reticent manners and morals of the cultivated classes of the nineteenth century…. Freud is that malicious person”³ who “reversed, once again, the usual conception: man’s chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.”⁴ Freud undertakes—at least within the modest limits of a fifty-minute hour—to deflower⁵ the chaste reticence of bourgeois-Christian social life.

As one enters the analytic situation one must check one’s manners and morals at the door. All rules—of syntax, of morality, of propriety—are to yield to the primary rule of saying whatever comes to mind. On the couch, the polite social conversation of the Gesellschaft with its forced associations is to yield to the indiscretions of the free associations of the impolite monologue of psychoanalysis. “Freudianism was to be indiscreet on principle…. The therapeutic hour … puts an end to decorum.”⁶

By thus inventing a social situation of minimal inhibition Freud provided a legitimate setting in which Viennese Jewry—and other “honorary Jews”—could legitimately desublimate (de-Westernize) and regress to their premodern “ids.” The analytic situation is a teleological suspension of the civil, an epoché of the civility and decorum “natural” to the West. The analytic situation is an oasis of temporary relief⁷ for Jewry’s “discomfort in the cultured state.”⁸ The primordial identity supposed to emerge in the permissive format of the psychoanalytic situation is a function of abstaining from the social norms outside that situation. Whereas Durkheim in formulating his program for a science of sociology stipulated that “the first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things”⁹ (Durkheim’s emphasis), Freud’s manifesto for a science of psychology might well have begun with, “Consider social facts as nothings.”

This deliberate abstention from the civilities is used as a therapeutic instrument promoting free association, regression, and transference. This rule of civil abstinence, Donald Kaplan writes, prevents the analytic dialogue from lapsing into “ordinary conversation.” For example, at the end of an analytic session, “a cordial ‘Good Afternoon,’ or a variation of it, is exchanged as the patient leaves the consulting room.” But if the session has been an especially upsetting one, the analyst may feel the impulse to add, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ … If the analyst withholds the impulse, he has ‘abstained.’ … The goal of analysis is to increase the abstinence until the basis of the relationship between analyst and patient is extinguished.“¹⁰ (If improperly”dosed," of course, this analytic “incivility” can turn the consulting room into an insulting room.) Psychoanalysis is, indeed, as Hannah Arendt says—justifying her nonuse of it—a “modern form of indiscretion.”¹¹

But it is also, in a deeper sense, a mirror inversion of the social world, a kind of heresy. C. S. Lewis, in The Personal Heresy, asks: “Is there, in social life, a grosser incivility than that of thinking about the man who addresses us instead of thinking about what he says?”¹² It is significant that just before Freud constructs his bourgeois picnic in the country, to show how “the indiscreet revelations of psycho-analysis,” “our work of revelation,”¹³ can bar the flight into illness that is “secrecy” (i.e. politeness) and break the spell of the bourgeois civilities (“in fairy tales you hear of evil spirits whose power is broken when you can tell them their name which they have kept secret”¹⁴), he pits his own “revelations” against those of Bernadette of Lourdes:

Think how common hallucinations of the Virgin Mary were in peasant-girls in former times. So long as such a phenomenon brought a flock of believers and resulted perhaps in a chapel being built on the sacred spot, the visionary state of these maidens was inaccessible to influence. Today even the priesthood has changed its attitude to such things; it allows police and medical men to visit the seer, and since then the Virgin appears very seldom. Or allow me to study the same processes … in an analogous situation which is on a smaller scale…. Suppose that a number of ladies and gentlemen in good society had planned a picnic….¹⁵ [My emphasis]

In Catholic peasant-girls, as in bourgeois ladies and gentlemen, a collective neurosis flourishes, and it is the “secondary gain” of this illness that keeps it in business, and it is secrecy that keeps this gain from analytic dissolution. The “indiscretions of physicians” alone can break the stranglehold of these hallucinations, from Mariolatry to civility. “Disclosure of the secret will have attacked, at its most sensitive point, the ‘aetiological equation’ from which the neuroses descend, will have made the ‘advantage through illness’ illusory.”¹⁶ We may presume to know what Freud had in mind as the “secondary gain” of the hallucination of an appearance of the Virgin to a peasant girl; but what, precisely, the “secondary gain” is in that collective neurosis which is bourgeois respectability Freud does not explicitly tell us. It is one of his deepest “secrets.” It is his animus against ’the sublimation called refinement. It is the grudge against the beauty of the West harbored by the emancipated intelligentsia of Jewry. Since Solomon Maimon it had been assaulting them, making them look ugly to themselves, in their own eyes, against their own wills. Of the “Mrs. K,” the teacher in Brownsville who had inducted the young Norman Podhoretz into the “mysteries” of good taste, into the Western bourgeois-Christian culture system—of her the grown man asks, rhetorically, how could she have explained to me “that there was no socially neutral ground to be found in the United States of America, and that a distaste for the surroundings in which I was bred, and ultimately (God forgive me) even for many of the people I loved, and so a new taste for other kinds of people—how could she have explained that all this was inexorably entailed in the logic of a taste for the poetry of Keats and the painting of Cézanne and the music of Mozart?”¹⁷ (my emphasis).

Freud’s ideas, George Steiner notes, “are firmly bound to the expressive and suppressive idiom of the Central European, largely Jewish middle class of the late nineteenth century in which Freud himself came of age.”¹⁸ In one respect, at least, Freud’s ideas are even more profoundly subculture-bound than Steiner realizes: in the Jewish subculture from which Freud and the majority of his patients had emerged, there was no privacy as such. “It is proverbial,” Zborowski and Herzog write,

that “there are no secrets” in the shtetl…. It is a joking point rather than a sore point, because basically the shtetl wants no secrets…. The great urge is to share and to communicate. There is no need to veil inquisitiveness behind a discreet pretense of “minding one’s own business.” … Isolation is intolerable. “Life is with people,”

they conclude, echoing the book’s title.¹⁹

In the nineteenth century, Eastern European Jewry enters the West and commits a stupendous “category mistake”:²⁰ systematically, it mistakes privacy for secrecy. Because, in the Gemeinschaft of their past, “privacy is neither known nor desired,”²¹ the many ways in which European burgeois culture managed to institutionalize the need to be private in public—the “decencies,” the decorum of public behavior in public places, yes, alas, “respectability’—all this is lost on the Jewish intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. To them, it appears as so much hypocrisy. Insistently, they moralize it.”What is for Freud ‘repression,’ psychologically understood, is’ ‘secrecy’ morally understood. Secrecy is the category moral illness, for it provides a hiding place for false motives."²²

For Freud, civility and politeness were not a social reality sui generis. He interpreted them in a moralizing fashion, as hypocrisy, secrecy, “reaction-formation.” The Gemeinschaft “space” of the psychoanalytic situation constituted a counter-Gesellschaft, in which direct expressions of affect were rewarded and civil exchanges penalized. “You act as if psychoanalysis stood high and perfect, and only our own faults keep us from accepting it,” exclaimed Joseph Wortis, stung, as a “nice,” bourgeois, Jewish-American medical student—patient, by Freud’s unabashed dogmatism. “It does not seem to occur to you that it is simply polite to reckon with one’s own prejudices, too.” “An analysis is not a place for polite exchanges,” replied Freud, according to Wortis’s diary of his psychoanalysis (for October 26, 1934): “An analysis is not a chivalrous affair between two equals.”²³ “A science cannot be bourgeois,” he later informed Wortis, “since it is only concerned with facts that are true everywhere.”²⁴ On December 13, Wortis asked Freud how was one to know if the interpretation of a dream is correct:

“How does the patient react when it is wrong?” I asked,

“He usually says nothing,” said Freud, “because it doesn’t concern him.”

“But I am accustomed to respond to things that are said to me; it is only polite,” I said.

“Politeness doesn’t enter into analysis,” Freud said.

“It is a habit with me,” I insisted. “Perhaps,” I added, “I have the wrong idea of the unconscious.”

“To be sure,” said Freud, “but what you have said has given you away.”²⁵

Freud knew, of course, at once, that he was in the presence of a hopeless case. Politeness out of expediency is one thing; politeness for pleasure is remediable;²⁶ but politeness out of habit, politeness as inner-worldly asceticism (Weber’s innerweltliche Askese) and cathected for itself betrays the depth to which bourgeois “niceness” has insinuated (internalized) itself. Wortis, in effect, is habitually, unconsciously polite. This is not the “unconscious” Freud had in mind. Wortis’s analyst then and there writes him off: the patient has “given himself away,” betrayed himself as “objectively” part of the bourgeois Gentile world. (Marx’s “we-they” cleavage had been more crassly economic; Freud’s cleavage is more nuanced, more sociocultural, as befits the central conflict in the era of social emancipation.)²⁷

Wortis’s entry in his diary for January 17, 1935 (already noted), is particularly important: he forces from Freud the admission of a differentiation between the moral and intellectual life, on the one hand, in which categories Freud has been making a case for the preeminence of the Jews, and the social life of mixed society, on the other. The entry reads:

“Ruthless egotism is much more common among Gentiles than among Jews,” said Freud, “and Jewish family life and intellectual life are on a higher plane.”

“You seem to think the Jews are a superior people, then,” I said. “I think nowadays they are,” said Freud. “When one thinks that 10 or 12 of the Nobel winners are Jews, and when one thinks of their other great achievements in the sciences and in the arts, one has every reason to think them superior.”

“Jews have bad manners,” I said, “especially in New York.”

“That is true,” said Freud, “they are not always adapted to social life. Before they enjoyed emancipation in 1818²⁸ they were not a social problem, they kept to themselves—with a low standard of life, it is true—but they did not go out in mixed society. Since then they have had much to learn.”²⁹ [My emphasis]

Not least among the things to be learned “beyond the pale” was the difficult knowledge that “civic betterment”—Dohm’s bürgerliche Verbesserung³⁰—_was to involve more than the exercise of bourgeois rights (the franchise, careers ouvertes aux talents, etc.); it was to entail also the performance of bourgeois rites governing the exchange “in mixed soiety”—i.e., with strangers—of those gifts known in the West as civilities. The rights and duties of the citoyen integrated the Jew into a remote solidarity with the Gentile West. Political, economic, and legal entitlement involved, as such, no direct, face-to-face, social interaction with one’s fellow citizens. It was a mediated, not a situated, solidarity, placing little or no strain on the personality system of emancipating Jewry. Its “collective representation” was the Enlightenment’s declaration of the “Rights of Man.” Membership in that community came for the asking. But, by 1830, and certainly by 1848, the French revolution was seen—notably by Marx—as a bourgeois revolution. Social solidarity with “respectable” bourgeois society was to be consummated in immediate, face-to-face encounters or not at all. The social skills for negotiating such solidarity must be learned, often, by mingling with members of bourgeois society itself. This was especially difficult for a “pariah peuple” closed out from social solidarity with respectable society because it was deemed wanting in respectability in the first place.